This is my response to yesterday’s message from Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize director Mark Winter, who said my objections to his contest design were without merit. Let me make a point here: this isn’t about me receiving $10 million. We all know that’s not going to happen. It’s about designing a contest that actually encourages innovation. Please read on as I explain…

I appreciate your position, Mark, and might have sent the same reply were I standing in your shoes. However I am sure I’ve uncovered exactly the sort of poor contest design that may well doom your effort. As such I will go ahead tomorrow and publish the letter I wrote to Paul Jacobs so my readers can weigh-in on this issue. Certainly it will make your contest more visible.

Bill Joy used to say “not all smart people work at Sun Microsystems,” and by this he meant that there is plenty of useful brainpower outside every organization — brainpower that is likely to see the germ or find the flaw in any strategy. Well not all smart people work at Qualcomm, Nokia, or the X-Prize Foundation, either. And what worries me about this is the inflexibility engendered in your announcement, which actively discourages the participation of prior art. Why would anyone with something well in hand wait 35 months? For that matter, what makes you think that 35 months from now this prize will even have relevance? What if it doesn’t? Do you just cancel it and say “never mind?”

The proper way to have designed this contest was by setting a goal and an overall ending date, not a date six years out to begin evaluation. If anyone accomplishes the contest tasks prior to that date, they should win. Your design assumes every entrant is starting from scratch. It also assumes every entrant is amateur, because no business these days would plan a 35 month R&D effort toward a single product. Ask Nokia and Qualcomm about that one.

Some of this thinking is simply not thinking while some of it is self-serving thought. You make the point that the X-Prize Foundation is in the business of running these contests, which suggests to me that a 6-7 year time frame probably suits the business model of the Foundation much more than it does the pursuit of this type of knowledge. We’ve seen this before from your organization, notably with the Google Lunar X-Prize, which also seems to have been designed to fail.

Note — In the case of the Google Lunar X-Prize, the X-Prize Foundation changed the rules several times including at one point inserting a delay of more than a year before the “final” rules would be set — a year during which entrants were supposed to blindly continue raising budgets of up to $100 million.

What I read in your message is an unwillingness to consider changing the contest rules. This is ironic given the immense likelihood that over time you will do just that for any number of reasons. This seems to happen on most of the X-Prize competitions at one point or another. This is the ideal time to correct an obvious flaw, so why not do it?

Or do you think that all smart people actually do work at Nokia, Qualcomm, and the X-Prize Foundation?

@DavidStewart . . . good point and apropos wrt the X-Prize. Which is the point of Bob’s letter to the X-Prize. But as Napoleon observed, “men are led by toys”.

Francis
January 25, 2013 at 6:14 am

Ok. I guess I’m not with Bob on this one. Because, like the game of getting first post, the X-Prize is a game: a contest constrained by arbitrary rules. If you don’t like the rules, you don’t have to play. There is no point arguing that a penalty kick in soccer for a unintentional hand ball is unfair. Them’s the rules. Furthermore the purpose of the X-Prize is to stimulate new innovation, not reward past innovation. As worthy as the as Bob’s team has accomplished, it’s now art that already exists. It’s not new. You know it’s bad enough that we have patent squatters and patent trolls. If Bob is rewarded by changing the rules to give the prize to prior art, we may soon have X-Prize squatters and X-Prize trolls too.

Bruce
January 27, 2013 at 12:33 am

I think you’re missing Bob’s point: Sure if you don’t like the rules, you don’t play, but what if nobody plays? If the goal of the contest is to develop a tri-corder, the only rules should be ones to require fairness between competitors, fairness in evaluation, and that actually encourage participation. Bob’s position is that the rules are too restrictive, too mutable, and create uncertainty, which will discourage participation.

If he’s wrong, good for the X-Prize Foundation, but if he’s right, the foundation will be spinning its wheels for the next few years on a contest that fails to achieve the desired breakthrough.

Roger
January 23, 2013 at 5:20 pm

I think your fundamental assumption that they want someone to play by the contest rules and eventually win is what is wrong. Instead this competition smells like a marketing campaign. For 35 months they get to claim how they are helping medicine and being charitable and on the side of regular people and helping healthcare costs etc, but don’t actually have to do anything. Heck the participants even have to pay their own way!

But you (Cringely) can do something about this. Why not try to convince a group of VCs to fund a competition with better rules?

The 35 month part is completely dumb, it leaves out or discourages a potentially large audience. Bob is right, first past the post should win, end of story. The $5K each entrant puts in should go toward having their product evaluated for the prize as soon as they submit it.

Ronc
January 24, 2013 at 6:13 pm

I don’t see how that would work. The first person to give them $5K would win since they would be the best (and only) participant. I imagine the 35 months is to allow word of the competition to spread and time to accumulate more entries.

Anibal
January 24, 2013 at 5:15 am

Agree to this comment. Bob you know -for years- people who is technically superb and millionaire, even in positions (I’m avoiding to make names here) in risk investment who certainly will not only join your endeavor but encourage you to put your invention on the market for real !!! Just make the calls you can make.

paul allen
January 23, 2013 at 5:24 pm

Third baby! Wooo!!!

Kirkwood
January 25, 2013 at 10:42 am

Really? All you yahoos can do is claim first/second/third post???? grow up

Todd
January 23, 2013 at 5:46 pm

I might be mistaken but I seem to recall a lecture (TEDtalk?) where Diamandis was talking about using a insurance company to guarantee the money for the Ansari X Prize by betting against a winner ever existing. Perhaps this is part of the math in the rules…

David Stewart
January 24, 2013 at 1:59 am

Sounds a bit like those sponsored prizes for a hole-in-one on the par 3 in golf tournaments. The sponsor offers a £100,000 prize for the first player to sink it but takes out a bet with the bookies at, say 50-1 to cover it. That way, the sponsor gets lots of nice publicity at a cost of 4 grand but if someone does get the hole-in-one, the sponsor gets double the publicity and they get their money back to boot. Nice.

and Lloyds or Liberty Mutual or whomever takes the insurance bid for the stunts has to figure the odds. most of the time, actuaries willin’ and the crick don’t rise, the 5 or 10 thousand or whatever will be pure profit.

you can’t buy much advertising for 5 or 10 grand on this scale.

you notice that the X prizes are marginally achieveable… private manned moon mission… sail backwards around the world in your shorts… whatever. that’s because somebody thinks they can table the chances and issue the bond in case it gets done.

world peace and harmony, fly a Buick to Mars and back for ice cream, get the GOP to raise taxes and the DFL to cut programs… those things approach and exceed 1/infinity in probabillity.

I agree with Bob – first across the finish line wins the prize. That is what they did with the original X-Prize for sub-orbital space. The rules were a bit fast and loose but that was the best way to play it. I had started the entry process only to be told that balloons would not be allowed. Later, they changed the rules to allow balloons and I was now two years behind the proverbial 8 ball. Such is life.

The idea that you have to wait and then be judged against other companies who are aiming for the same deadline is not way to go if you want progress. It is the best way to go if you are trying to milk the process for money and marketing.

Mary Alyce Cringely
January 23, 2013 at 6:47 pm

I love that pic of Chase. He looked just like you as a baby. So small and too soon to be gone.

John
January 23, 2013 at 7:35 pm

Beautiful. As a parent I can only imagine how hard that loss must have been.

I would certainly like to find a way to replicate portions of the x-prize’s model for contests, but perhaps they have jumped the shark, here.

I have seen many other attempts at structuring contests by other orgs that were on terms that so obviously benefited the contest creator and not the technology creator as to be ludicrous. “Solve world hunger – and give us all the rights to the technology”, and stuff like that. There was a similar nonsensical contest recently for ” make a network radio that could always win over competing traffic in an emergency. I suggested they look at really, really, big spark gap transmitters.

SteveB
January 24, 2013 at 1:41 am

Hi Bob and all,

Well this sounds like the ‘SIDS Award Challenge’ – aimed at the VC and funds guys, a challenge to put together a solid package to complete the work you started. Challengers listed on a web page, first past the line wins.

Their payoff – being able to use the Award in marketing, and being able to say: ‘We did the finance side – we can find backers in these times – come to us.’

Just an idea; don’t know if this will be motivating enough.

SteveB

JJones
January 24, 2013 at 1:43 am

Based on some of the comments here it smells more and more like the contest is some accounting trick to write off taxes. Does it even make sense as a marketing ploy? Not anymore?

brendan
January 24, 2013 at 4:12 am

All the X Prize is is a PR stunt for both the “sponsors” and the organization itself. There is no real expectation that anyone would actually come up with a viable solution, it’s just a show for marketing blurbs (as previously indicated). If anyone actually came up with a solution, it ought to be in the marketplace in 6 years time, not being “evaluated” (or reverse engineered) by Qualcomm & Co. It’s worth noting that there are now two companies actively looking at mining asteroids and who aren’t wasting their time trying to win money from Google via the X Prize….

Bottom Feed'n Lawyer
January 24, 2013 at 7:11 am

These X Prizes sound like something Manti Te’o should be involved in….

John
January 24, 2013 at 7:49 am

I wanted to enter a team in the 100-mpg X-prize a few years ago. I had done research on the technology in college and had a good network of people who could help with the project. There are two very good engineering schools near me who were eager to help. I had found a few people willing and able to raise about $20M for the project.

Before I could even get started the X-prize gang changed the contest schedule. Since I was going to involve academia in my effort I needed to plan the project around their academic schedules. The X-prize changes blew my plans out of the water.

One of our team goals was to develop a few great cars and the technology needed to mass produce them. We wanted to be able to license our work to the atuo industry after the contest. I was working with a few firms who would be contributing technology and materials to the effort. I had planned on putting together a “patent pool” agreement so that everyone’s intellectual property was protected and their work could be easily licensed after the contest. More contest rule changes put in doubt whether we could retain ownership of our work and profit from it. That killed our team.

The whole purpose of a technology contest is to produce new things of value to society. That means someone can start making and selling them, and society can start benefiting from them. I don’t know about the Qualcomm contest, but too many are little more than PR exercises.

David Janke
January 24, 2013 at 7:59 am

+1 “little more than PR exercises”

And to be fair, not allowing you to patent parts of your contest submission isn’t at cross purposes to your desired aims:

“The whole purpose of a technology contest is to produce new things of value to society. That means someone can start making and selling them, and society can start benefiting from them”

If anything, leaving the innovations unpatented makes it easier for society as a whole to benefit from them… it just leaves you broke out in the cold

David Janke
January 24, 2013 at 7:53 am

If the goal is to increase innovation in a specific area, then a 35-month period seems reasonable.

First-past-the-post benefits existing solutions, not innovation. Bob touched on this (from the other direction) when he said that the rule “…actively discourages the participation of prior art. Why would anyone with something well in hand wait 35 months?”. They wouldn’t… but they’re also not creating anything new (hence the “prior”).

(Plus, I’m sure the X Prize staff assumes they came up with a goal that no one has a solution to, yet)

It’s my understanding that the X Prize attempts to set a _very_ difficult goal. Then, people striving toward that goal drive incidental innovation… in much the same way that landing a man on the moon gave us Tang (and apparently some other stuff, too)

+1 to Brendan’s “All the X Prize is is a PR stunt for both the ‘sponsors’ and the organization itself” comment.
I guess Bob’s probably just less cynical about contests than I am 🙂

Ronc
January 24, 2013 at 6:33 pm

Re: Tang: “Sales of Tang were poor until NASA used it on John Glenn’s Mercury flight and subsequent Gemini missions. Since then, it was closely associated with the U.S. manned spaceflight program, leading to the misconception that Tang was invented for the space program.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink)

Dr John
January 24, 2013 at 9:31 am

Forget about the X-prize for a Z-competition.

What I’d really like to see is Bob’s SIDS devices up and running. I can think not only of this one aspect being inportant, but even for adult monitoring too. It’s a biggie, bigger than the X-prize for sure.

Kent
January 24, 2013 at 11:17 am

Bob,

With all due respect, I think you’re wrong about this. I offer my sincere condolences for your loss. I offer my sincere admiration that you’ve worked hard to ensure others don’t have to suffer through what you have, but if we’re being objective here, your invention does NOT meet the criteria that a winning entry must meet. Your device, although ingenious, does NOT diagnose a set of 15 conditions that have been identified as a big public health threat in North America, does it? So why, exactly, do you think your device should win this contest when it doesn’t even come CLOSE fulfilling the criteria for a winning entry? Are you hung up on some (non-existent) similarity, perhaps, that’s implied by your mutual use fo the word “tricorder?” Go back and watch some TNG. A (medical) tricorder is an all-purpose diagnostic tool; NOT something that diagnoses and aims remediate a SINGLE condition. The Tricorder X-Prize subscribes to the spirit of that all-purpose diagnostic tool. That is simply NOT what you have built.

I’m amazed you can declare my project a loser in this contest based on the limited information provided so far. Frankly you know almost nothing about the output of our four years of work, nor do you know about the knowledge gained from the many blind alleys we visited along the way. Saying we have a SIDS solution of sorts doesn’t at all mean our work can’t be repurposed for other conditions: you just assume that. Why?

Why are you unwilling to give my group the benefit of ANY doubt? You seem to feel we shouldn’t even be given a chance to fail, yet isn’t that what contests are all about, with most of the contestants eventually losers?

My major point has always been that the contest design is flawed. It remains flawed whether my team wins or loses.

But more to your point, take our monitor off the wall, put it in near contact to a patient and you have what is essentially a handheld CAT scanner. Not only does it have the scanning ability, it has some local diagnostic ability based on interpreting the gathered data which is very similar to the backscatter units in airports. Not all of this happens at 60 GHz by the way — there are multiple scanners involved. This diagnostic ability can of course be augmented from the cloud. If something can be diagnosed from a moving image, infrared, audio, or RF — that is no chemical tests — we have a shot at it.

We can see the bad heart valve, hear it leaking, derive a blood O2 saturation reading from other parameters to confirm the negative impact, etc. How far from the X-Prize requirements is this example?

I didn’t see anything in the X-Prize requirements about peeing or bleeding on the device, did you? So we aren’t specifically excluded at all.

Ronc
January 24, 2013 at 6:40 pm

Perhaps the confusion lies in the emphasis on SIDS an the lack of a list that should include the other 14 diseases.

Jeff McMorris
January 24, 2013 at 6:45 pm

Just glancing at the contest rules if you have a device that can diagnose all this from the device without needing a healthcare provider to analyze the raw data: I would just forget about the contest. Go find some VC money! Especially since you have a prototype. I am sure somebody will fund you and you will be a billionaire before this contest is even underway. Here is the list of diseases you must be able to analyze from there rules.

You may be right, though VCs these days are more stupid than ever and stay away from health applications in droves.

What’s been useful about this exercise for me is just that it got us to pull something out of a drawer that we hadn’t looked at for six years — six years that may have brought the market closer. And in that time certain parts of the solution have gotten cheaper, too. Mobile output devices are vastly better and we have a new approach to generating that 60 GHz signal that’s way better.

When the dust settles from this X-Prize thing my partners and I will consider next steps, if any.

Kent
January 24, 2013 at 10:55 pm

Bob,

I only knew the facts as you have presented them over your last three blog posts. As YOU presented it to your readers, the focus of your research was SIDS, with only a fleeting mention of the fact that the research you’ve accomplished might prove more generally useful. You certainly did NOT make that clear. But beyond that, there’s a pretty specific set of conditions you must be able to detect to qualify as the winner (regardless of the timeframe that you disagree with). Ability to detect those conditions constitutes the acceptance test. While you may in fact be trending in that direction, the (ten) million dollar question is: can you pass that acceptance test? If not, then isn’t it premature of you to be declaring that you should have this in the bag already?

The point of this series is to get them to change the rules. The best way to accomplish that is by speaking boldly. The X-Prize Foundation has shown itself to be unmotivated by anything less than a sledgehammer blow, so that’s what I provided. The rules were very poorly considered and could be correctly modified with almost no effort.

Algernon
January 24, 2013 at 12:08 pm

Literally, as a layman (Carpenter), do I have X-prize’s formula right?

Publicity – Insurance + ??? = Profit

Jason Osgood
January 24, 2013 at 7:24 pm

The proper way to have designed this contest was by setting a goal and an overall ending date… If anyone accomplishes the contest tasks prior to that date, they should win.

Exactly. First past the post. Winner takes all.

Being a casual observer, I just sort of assumed that’s how all these X-Prizes worked. Modeled after previous challenges, like Kremer Prize for crossing the English Channel with a human powered aircraft won by the Gossamer Albatross. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Albatross

First, there isn’t a necessary conflict here. Bob could enter and get laudatory comments and then the gauntlet would be down…. beat Bob in 3 years.

I can, by the way, beat Bob. But not without a software engineer with image analysis experience. I’ve tried contacting one expert at CMU, and one at a private firm but they didn’t write back.
I have the clinical trial experience and medical connections to do the testing. Contact thru website links

I watched a youtube video several months ago that may be useful to your project. It was about a video processing algorithim that could make out heart beats/blood flows through the skin. It’s able to detect subtle changes that we cannot normally see by analysing a normal video stream. I remember wondering if it will work for black skin. Surely, this being a tech community, a few of the guys here would have seen it.

The Phillips Heart Monitor app measures your heart rate and respiration rate just through the facing camera on your iPad. It’s very fickle – you have to have the iPad very still and not move – but the technology is very impressive.

If I could invent something that I thought was capable of winning this prize 35 months from now, I’d be hawking it from every corner of Sand Hill Rd.. 35 months from now we’d be on the NYSE.

Ronc
January 27, 2013 at 3:17 pm

I suspect they are not spending $10,000,000 to reward the person who first submits a real tricorder as they defined it. They are spending it for 3 years of publicity and buzz about their company and its ability to foster the creation of something that would not exist were it not for their competition.

Paul
April 1, 2013 at 4:19 am

I’d like to add that, while I agree with Ronc’s thinking, I don’t believe that’s the whole story.

I believe they also don’t want to give the prize to the team that completes the objective first, but the team that completes the objective the best during the allotted time period. If Team A finishes 2 weeks in and they stop improving their product, they’re going to lose to Team B who continues to build on their device for the entire amount of time.

At the end of the day, the corporate hosts of the competition are going to look better if the winning device is better than what people are playing around with right now, today.

Add to this the fact that the big smartphone companies are putting in MAJOR R&D into smart WATCHES, which will be in constant contact with their wearer’s skin, and the next 5 years looks like a great time to develop a “Tricorder” as opposed to the last 5 years.

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